Apatow

Last year, Julie and I rented "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" on the recommendation of a friend, but with great trepidation. We thought it would amount to a bunch of vicious jokes making fun of the idea of sexual purity. But surely, we thought, there must be something more to it, or our friend wouldn't have praised it so highly.

The Judd Apatow film was pretty raunchy, and pretty hilarious. And Andy, the title character, turned out to be the hero, a true mensch whose commitment to purity came out of his genuine respect for women, and his sweet little devotion to true love. You end the film cheering for this golden-hearted dork, and realizing that you have just seen perhaps the most subversive feature-film presentation for social conservatism that you'll ever witness. It was terrific.

Ross says that director Apatow's latest, "Knocked Up" -- a comedy about a dork who gets a woman pregnant after a fling, and responds by deciding to clean up his life -- offers more of the same. I loved this passage from the NYT Magazine's profile of Apatow:

“My way of dealing with the world has always been to make fun of it and observe it but not take part in it,” Apatow told me when we first met in the fall of 2005. “That’s how I became a writer. But when you have kids, suddenly you have to be part of things. It leads almost to a breakdown because your whole defense mechanism is now really destructive.”

I had to laugh at this because it's exactly what happened to me. Julie reminded me how we'd come to learn that there's no such thing as irony in the birthing room. There's something about becoming a father or mother for the first time that annihilates ironic detachment. In fact, if you do remain ironically detached -- cool, in other words -- as a parent, something is wrong with you. I think about how snotty and cruel (but funny) my own writing used to be before I had kids, and I just shake my head. It's fatally easy to make fun of everything when you don't have a stake in it.